But as I stood there in the desert watching the Burning Man, I wondered what meaning its flaming body carried for me. What was being sacrificed, and for what sins or what hopes? What messages did its smoke carry up into the firmament? I looked to my left and Ana’s eyes were brimming. To my right was a young couple clasped together and frozen Pompeii-like, the distant fire flickering on their faces. The man’s face was fixed in a state of wonder and the woman’s in a kind of beatific grace. I gazed out beyond them, at the sea of faces awash in some kind of collective catharsis, and tried to decipher the moment through their expressions. What exactly were they experiencing? And why was it eluding me? I studied the crowd, my eyes wandering from face to face, my perplexity and sadness growing until I realized the burn was already halfway through. I turned back towards the inferno, to the timbers and central support beams calving and collapsing into themselves, and imagined, for a moment, that the structure was filled with bodies, like the wicker man Julius Caesar had once reported the Druids built and filled with living people. Real bodies trapped inside a symbolic one. A burning, collapsing tower of sacrifice. I felt Will slide his arm around my waist and pull me into him. Trying to make us like every other reverent couple, subsumed into the sublime. But as I gazed at the fire, I realized it symbolized nothing for me. Though I suppose it’s always impressive to watch anything of that size burn. Anything burning on that magnitude accrues significance, even if there is none.

As your body comes into focus, you are suddenly every effigy I have ever seen. Every icon, statue, scarecrow, mummy, rock cairn, fetish, mannequin, every vessel of sacrifice, every voodoo doll riven through with pins. The papier-­mâché George Bush I watched set alight at the protest. The flaming Guy Fawkes figurines set alight on the fifth of November. The burning Judas hanging from trees across Mexico at Easter. Less than people but more than objects. Abject things caught somewhere in between.

I am standing in the doorway and can see, three steps away in bed, an object symbolizing a body, a body symbolizing a person, a person symbolizing my mother.

But here, at last, there is meaning.

Here in this moment your body seems to contain every meaning. Contain the world. Contain me.

VII

VII